19th General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology

The General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology is one of the largest and most important meetings of social psychologists, which takes place in Europe every three years. Researches are invited to present their work about a wide range of topics in social psychology including but not limited to : Attitudes, Emotion and Motivation, Group Processes, Intergroup Relations, Interpersonal Processes, Social Cognition, and Self and Identity.

The 19th General Meeting took place in Kraków from June 30th – July 4th, 2023.

Programme complet :

https://easp2023krakow.com/program/

 

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Focus sur la présentation de la doctorante Hoï-Tong Wong

 

La doctorante Hoï-Tong Wong a participé au General Meeting de l’EASP 2023 et a réalisé une communication en poster intitulée :

 “They must be conspiracy theorists since I don’t perceive them as belonging to my group”

Hoï-Tong Wong et Patrick Mollaret, Université Paris 8, Laboratoire Parisien de Psychologie de Sociale (LAPPS)

ABSTRACT :

This empirical research aims to improve our knowledge on the parameters people need to qualify statements as belonging to conspiracy beliefs. Results show that people judge statements as belonging to conspiracy beliefs only when they come from outgroup sources.

In recent years, research on conspiracy theories has been expanding in social psychology (Wagner-Egger, 2020). Yet, only few (Douglas, van Prooijen, Sutton, 2022) tried to understand the reason behind which people judge certain statements as illustrating conspiracy theories. This empirical research aims to improve our knowledge on the parameters people need to qualify statements as belonging to conspiracy beliefs. In this study (N=115), participants read a fictive scenario in which a candidate to an important position at an international organization was accused of sexual aggressions. They then read two official statements from two different sources : (1) The national ingroup accused the outgroup of having stained their candidate’s reputation to take them out of the competition (simple accusation) while (2) the national outgroup accused the ingroup of having stained their own candidate’s reputation to pin the blame on them (false flag accusation). We found that people judged false flag accusations as being more conspiratory than simple accusations but only in the case of the ingroup accusing the outgroup F(1,113)=27.94, p<.001 η²p=.20. Therefore, we can conclude that people judge statements as belonging to conspiracy beliefs only when they come from outgroup sources, which they neither trust nor perceive as sharing their beliefs.

Keywords : social judgment, source credibility, content judgment, source judgment, conspiracy